The upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2 will bring quite a few improvements and new features for all sorts of users. Developers, for one, will be getting significant file system performance upgrades.
Microsoft has released the Windows 11 build 25982 for members of the Insider program in the Canary Channel. It will gradually add the Copilot in Windows feature among other new additions.
Motivation and Context
Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication.
Description
In many ways Block Cloning is similar to the existing deduplication, but there are some important differences:
Deduplication is automatic and Block Cloning is not - one has to use a dedicated system call(s) to clone the given file/blocks.
Deduplication keeps all data blocks in its table, even those referenced just ones. Block Cloning creates an entry in its tables only when there are at least two references to the given data block. If the block was never explicitly cloned or the second to last reference was dropped, there will be neither space nor performance overhead.
Deduplication needs data to work - one needs to pass real data to the write(2) syscall, so hash can be calculated. Block Cloning doesn&#